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11
The Mirage of Greek Continuity:
On the Uses and Abuses of Analogy
in Some Travel Narratives from the
Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century
Suzanne Saïd
P. Walcot’s influential book Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern
(1970) best illustrates the mirage of Greek continuity and
the persistence of ‘an uncritically survivalist argument’. 1 His
‘ancient peasants’ include not only ‘Hesiod and his fellow Boeotians’
2 and ‘early Greek peasant society’, 3 but also Greek
society in the classical period, since Walcot, following a suggestion
of the sociologist A. W. Gouldner, 4 argues that the set of
values of the early Greeks were identical to those held by fifth
and fourth century Athenians, supporting his claim with a
series of random quotations from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus
and from Greek tragedy. 5 As for his ‘modern Greeks’, they
come from the mountain villages studied by contemporary
ethnographers such as Friedl (Vasilika ), Campbell (the Sarakatsani),
and Peristiany (the Pitsilloi), as well as from the Aegean
islands described in a report written in 1886 by the
‘folklorist-traveller’ Theodore Bent. 6 According to Walcot,
1
M. Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-glass: Critical Ethnography
in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge, 1987), 57.
2
P. Walcot, Greek Peasants Ancient and Modern: A Comparison of Social
and Moral Values (Manchester, 1970), 119.
3
Ibid. 27–8.
4
A. W. Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social
Theory (London, 1967), 76.
5
Walcot, Greek Peasants 74–5.
6
E. Friedl, Vassilika: a Village in Modern Greece (New York, 1962); J. K.
Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage : A Study of Institutions and Moral